Living with Fibromyalgia: An Unexpected Relief
I have fibromyalgia. I wasn't looking for pain relief from psilocybin — I was looking for a mental health break. What I found was unexpected.
Fibromyalgia has been my constant companion for eleven years. I've made my peace with it in the way you make peace with a chronic tenant: working around it, managing it, living alongside it. I took psilocybin not for the pain but for the depression and anxiety that coexist with long-term chronic illness.
During the session, at a modest 1.5 grams, something shifted in my relationship to the pain. Not the pain itself — I was still aware of it. But the quality of my attention to it changed. The pain was there; the suffering I usually added to the pain was temporarily absent.
What surprised me was the residual effect. For two weeks after the session, my pain levels were meaningfully lower than my baseline. This is anecdotal, unblinded, confounded by mood improvement, possibly coincidence. I'm aware of all of that. It also happened, and it kept happening across multiple sessions over the following months.
I now use psilocybin at low doses periodically, with intention around the pain as well as the mood. I'm not claiming it cures fibromyalgia. I'm claiming it has been a meaningful part of my symptom management that no other intervention had provided to the same degree.
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